For Black History Month we wanted to present to you an in depth look at the notable works of numerous black authors whose books we have for loan here at the David Wilson Library. We have searched our library shelves high and low to curate a list of works that cover a wide selection of experiences from both male and female perspectives. All of these items can be found in the library and are absolutely worth a read, we have tried to keep this list as concise as possible so you can easily identify which reads will interest you. Have fun reading through our recommendations and if you have any others which you think are worth adding to our Read at Leicester Collection then please visit the Reading Zone and fill in one of our Represent postcards, any books you suggest we will purchase and you will soon be able to find it as part of our collection. The power to diversify this collection is in your hands, please use it and make a difference.
24 Black authors in focus
Number one: Michelle Alexander, October 7, 1967 – present
Michelle Alexander is a writer, civil rights advocate, visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary and is an opinion columnist for The New York Times. Her most noted book discusses race-related issues specific to African American males and the prejudice of the prison system in the United States, but Alexander noted that this discrimination is also felt among other disadvantaged and minority populations. Alexander’s central premise, from which the book derives its title, is that “mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow. Despite the dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still has effects today. The US criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
Recommended Read
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colour-blindness
Find this book here.
Number two: Maya Angelou, April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014
Maya Angelou was a poet, singer, memoir-ist, and civil rights activist in the United States. Angelou has published many works over the years including autobiographies, essays, poetry, plays, movies, and television shows. For these works, she has received many awards and over 50 honorary degrees. She is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which tells of her childhood and early adult experiences. The first of these autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells of her experiences up to the age of 17 and is a coming-of-age story that shows how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. In the course of the text, Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.
Recommended Read
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Find this book here.
Number three: James Baldwin, August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987
James Baldwin was a novelist, playwright, and activist in the United States. His essays, explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies. Some of Baldwin’s essays are book-length, including The Fire Next Time (1963). This book includes two essays that were written in the 1960’s during a time of segregation between White and Black Americans. The first essay is a letter to his nephew where he challenges him to convert his anger from racism prevalent in America into having a passionate and broad outlook on experiences within the black community. The second essay documents Baldwin’s dissatisfaction with Christianity and how it has affected Black Americans.
Recommended Read
The Fire Next Time
Find this book here.
Number four: Octavia Butler, June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006
Butler was an African American science fiction author. She received both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Born in Pasadena, California, she was shy as a child but found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing as a teenager. First published in 1979, Kindred is still a popular book. It is a novel that incorporates time travel and is modelled on slave narratives. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organisations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses.
Recommended Read
Kindred
Find this eBook here.
Number five: Ta-Nehisi Coates, September 30, 1975 – present
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American author and journalist. Coates gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy. He is also the writer of a Black Panther series for Marvel Comics. Coates’ second book, Between the World and Me, was published in July 2015. The title is drawn from a Richard Wright poem of the same name about a Black man discovering the site of a lynching and becoming incapacitated with fear, creating a barrier between himself and the world. Coates said that one of the origins of the book was the death of a college friend, Prince Carmen Jones Jr., who was shot by police in a case of mistaken identity. It won the 2015 National Book Award for Non-fiction and was a nominee for the Phi Beta Kappa 2016 Book Awards.
Recommended Read
Between the World and Me
Find this book here.
Number six: W.E.B Du Bois, February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963
W.E.B Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in 1909. Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work in African American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era.
Recommended Read
The sociological souls of black folk: essays
Find this eBook here.
Number seven: Ralph Ellison, March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994
Ralph Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. The novel addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African Americans early in the twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, calling it “the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century”, rather than a “race novel, or even a bildungsroman”. According to The New York Times, former U.S. president Barack Obama modelled his memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison’s novel.
Recommended Read
Invisible Man
Find this book here.
Number eight: Roxane Gay, October 15, 1974 – present
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and commentator. She is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017). In it, Gay discusses her experience with weight, body image, and building a positive relationship with food, particularly following her experience as a childhood victim of sexual violence. Gay described this book as a testimony of “what it’s like to live in a world that tried to discipline unruly bodies.”
Recommended Read
Hunger: a memoir of (my) body
Find this book here.
Number nine: Alex Haley, August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992
Alex Haley is an American writer whose works of historical fiction and reportage depicted the struggles of African Americans. His first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which he co-wrote with Malcolm X (1925–1965), was well-received by both critics and the public. It describes the trajectory of Malcolm X’s life from street criminal to national spokesman for the Nation of Islam to his conversion to Sunni Islam. It also outlines Malcolm X’s philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Haley ghostwrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm X between 1963 and Malcolm X’s February 1965 assassination. The work sold more than five million copies and launched Haley’s writing career. Haley began work on his next project, Roots soon after the completion of his first work. Roots follows the life of Kunta Kinte, a proud African who was kidnapped from his village in West Africa. In the United States, the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of African American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.
Recommended Read
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Find this book here.
Number ten: Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), September 25, 1952 – present
Bell Hooks is an acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer. She has authored over three dozen books and has published works that span several genres, including cultural criticism, personal memoirs, poetry collections, and children’s books. The pen name is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, a woman known for speaking her mind.
The focus of hooks’ writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, gender, class, spirituality and teaching, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. Published in 2000, All about love: new visions, discusses aspects of love in modern society. Hooks combines personal anecdotes as well as psychological and philosophical ideas to develop and strengthen her argument. She focuses on romantic love and believes that in American culture men have been socialised to mistrust the value and power of love while women have been socialised to be loving in most situations – even when their need to receive love goes unmet.
Recommended Read
All About Love: New Visions
Find this book here.
Number eleven: Langston Hughes, February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career. One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealisation and negative stereotypes. Not Without Laughter portrays African-American life in Kansas in the 1910’s, focusing on the effects of class and religion on the community. The main story line focuses on protagonist Sandy’s “awakening to the sad and the beautiful realities of black life in a small Kansas town.” The major intent of the novel is to portray Sandy’s life as he tries to be the best he can be, aspiring to folks such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
Recommended Read
Not Without Laughter
Find this book here.
Number twelve: Zora Neale Hurston, January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960
Zora Neal Hurson was an influential author of African-American literature, anthropologist, and filmmaker, who portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South, and published research on Haitian Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. The main character Janie Crawford, an African-American woman in her early forties, recounts the story of her life to her best friend Pheoby Watson through an extended flashback. Readers learn about her life in three major periods, corresponding to her marriages to three very different men. The novel explores Janie’s “ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny.” The novel was initially poorly received, but since the late 20th century, it has been regarded as a seminal work in both African-American literature and women’s literature. TIME included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.
Recommended Read
Their Eyes were Watching God
Find this eBook here.
Number thirteen: Harriet Ann Jacobs, February 11, 1813 – March 7, 1897
Harriet Ann Jacobs was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and was later freed.
She became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs wrote an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first serialised in a newspaper and published as a book in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book was a reworking of the genres of slave narrative and sentimental novel, and was one of the first books to address the struggle for freedom by female slaves, explore their struggles with sexual harassment and abuse, and their effort to protect their roles as women and mothers. Harriet Ann Jacobs insisted on showing that black slaves were women and mothers, too, challenging the white middle-class cult of womanhood as too narrowly construed. Slave women had often been blamed when white men used them sexually, and Jacobs wanted to show how they were abused by the impossible power relationships.
Recommended Read
Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl
Find this eBook here.
Number fourteen: Andrea Levy, 7 March 1956 – 14 February 2019
Andrea Levy was an English author born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities. Having not read a book until the age of 23, she subsequently became aware of the power of books and began to read “excessively”. Small Island is Levy’s fourth novel, which the Guardian selected as one of the most defining books of the decade. It won three awards: the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Recommended Read
Small Island
Find this book here.
Number fifteen: Audre Lorde, February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992
Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, dealing largely with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, and the exploration of black female identity. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a collection of essential essays and speeches which were influential in the development of contemporary feminist theories. The book examines a broad range of topics, including love, self-love, war, imperialism, police brutality, coalition building, violence against women, Black feminism, and movements towards equality that recognise and embrace differences as a vehicle for change. The essays in this landmark collection are extensively taught and have become a widespread area of academic analysis.
Recommended Read
Sister Outsider (essays and speeches)
Find this book here.
Number sixteen: Toni Morrison, February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019
Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Beloved(1987). In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a film in 1998. Morrison is a multi-award-winning writer including Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Set after the American Civil War (1861–65), Beloved is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted during 1998 into a movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey.
Recommended Read
Beloved
Find this book here.
Number seventeen: Walter Mosley, January 12, 1952 – present
Walter Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California. Mosley’s fame increased in 1992 when presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favourite authors. Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin’ to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates. Mosley has said that he prefers to be called a novelist as opposed to being described as a black author. He explains his desire to write about “black male heroes” saying “hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes… There are black male protagonists and black male supporting characters, but nobody else writes about black male heroes.” Devil in a blue dress is a 1990 hard-boiled mystery novel, Mosley’s first published book. The text centres on the main character, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, and his transformation from a day labourer into a detective.
Recommended Read
Devil in a Blue Dress
Find this book here.
Number eighteen: Barack Obama, August 4, 1961 – present
Barack Obama is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected to the presidency. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organiser in Chicago. This is the second book written by then-Senator Barack Obama. It became number one on both the New York Times and Amazon.com bestsellers lists in the fall of 2006, after Obama had been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. In the book, Obama expounds on many of the subjects that became part of his 2008 campaign for the presidency. Obama announced his ultimately successful presidential campaign on February 10, 2007, a little more than three months after the book’s release. The book, divided into nine chapters, outlines Obama’s political and spiritual beliefs, as well as his opinions on different aspects of American culture.
Recommended Read
The Audacity of Hope
Find this book here.
Number nineteen: Michelle Obama, January 17, 1964 – present
Michelle Obama is an American lawyer, university administrator and writer, who was the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017.
Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, Obama is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. In her early legal career, she worked at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met Barack Obama whom she married in 1992. As first lady, Obama served as a role model for women, and worked as an advocate for poverty awareness, education, nutrition, physical activity and healthy eating. In 2018 Obama published her autobiography, Becoming. Described by the author as a deeply personal experience, the book talks about her roots and how she found her voice, as well as her time in the White House, her public health campaign, and her role as a mother. It sold more copies than any other book published in the United States in 2018, breaking the record in just 15 days.
Recommended Read
Becoming
Find this book here.
Number twenty: Bryan Stevenson, November 14, 1959 – present
Bryan Stevenson is an American lawyer, social justice activist, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a clinical professor at New York University School of Law. Stevenson has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He argues that the history of slavery and lynchings has influenced the subsequent high rate of death sentences in the South, where it has been disproportionately applied to minorities. Just Mercy was named a Book of the Year by the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Esquire, and Time. The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One in every 15 people born there today is expected to go to prison. For black men this figure rises to one in 3. And Death Row is disproportionately black, too. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, startling racial inequality, and legal brinksmanship – and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. At once an unforgettable account of an idealistic lawyer’s coming of age and a moving portrait of the lives of those he has defended, Just Mercy is an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of justice.
Recommended Read
Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption
Find this book here.
Number twenty-one: Angie Thomas, 1988 – present
Angie Thomas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She grew up near the home of assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and has stated that her mother heard the gunshot that killed him. When she was six years old, Thomas witnessed a shootout. The following day, her mother took her to the library to show her that “there was more to the world than what she saw that day”, which inspired her to take up writing. Used to writing in the fantasy genre Thomas spoke with a colleague professor stating that her work may not be taken seriously. Her professor suggested that as her experiences were so unique, she had the opportunity to give a voice to those who had no voice of their own and to tell stories that had never been told. The Hate U Give was written, as Thomas says, to bring light to the controversial issue of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. In summary, this book tells the story of a girl named Starr Carter and how her life is impacted by the death of her friend, Khalil, an unarmed black teen shot by a white police officer. The Hate U Give deals with the effect of police brutality on the communities of those around the victim.
Recommended Read
The Hate U Give
Find this book here.
Number twenty-two: Alice Walker, February 9, 1944 – present
Alice Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. She wrote her novel The Color Purple (1982), for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of African American women in the Southern United States in the 1930’s, addressing numerous issues including the family’s exceedingly low position in American social culture. Though the novel has garnered critical acclaim, it has also been the subject of controversy. It is 17th on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently challenged or banned books. Commonly cited justifications for banning the book include sexual explicitness, explicit language, violence, and homosexuality. The book received greater scrutiny amidst controversy surrounding the release of the film adaptation in 1985. The controversy centered around the depiction of black men, which some critics saw as feeding stereotypical narratives of black male violence, while others found the representation compelling and relatable.
Recommended Read
The Color Purple
Find this book here.
Number twenty-three: Colson Whitehead, November 6, 1969 – present
Colson Whitehead is an American novelist. He has written six novels, including The Underground Railroad which was published in 2016, for which he was awarded the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”). The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the south-eastern United States during the 19th century. They decide to make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantations by following the Underground Railroad, that the novel depicts as primarily a rail transport system in addition to a series of safe houses and secret routes.
Recommended Read
The Underground Railroad
Find this book here.
For a more in-depth review of this title please see our Black History Month Book Review!
Number twenty-four: Richard Wright, September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960
Richard Wright was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Racial themes run through many of his works particularly focusing on the discrimination faced by African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Native Son lays out the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black poverty-stricken youth from the 1930’s living on Chicago’s South Side. Immediately a best-seller, Native Son sold 250,000 hardcover copies in the first three weeks of its publication and helped to describe the racial divide in America. Wright also become the wealthiest black writer at the time and resulted in him becoming a spokesperson for African American issues even being often referred to as “the father of Black American literature”.
Recommended Read
Native Son
Find this book here.
We really hope that you enjoy this list and remember if you have any more to add to the Read at Leicester Collection then please do send us your recommendations!
Happy Black History Month!
Article by Hannah Congrave and Ellie Rowley-Conwy
